Florida vignettes from Hurricane Katrina

The Associated Press

Published Saturday, September 03, 2005

Stories of Floridians and refugees grappling with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina:

Lynn-Marie Carty, a St. Petersburg private investigator who specializes in finding people and reuniting families, has worked with her national network of volunteers to put up a Web site to help people who have been separated by Hurricane Katrina.

The site -- www.reunitelouisiana.com -- will allow people to post messages about who they are looking for or to let others know they are safe.

"We just wanted to have a central location for everybody that's trying to keep in touch with each other," Carty said. "It seems like we need some organization here, and we wanted to be able to provide that."

She said it's clear from watching the news reports that communication is a problem. She said she hopes that the Red Cross or some other agency will provide computer access somewhere for refugees at some point so people can post to the Web site.

"We're very fortunate this hurricane didn't affect us, and we want to help the people in Louisiana the best way we know how," Carty said.

She said the site will be up Saturday, but it was already accessible Friday via a link from her Web site, www.ReunitePeople.com .

"It's a reunion registry for the lost for the searching," she said.

Ruth Cascio, 62, and her 31-year-old son Christopher are living in a 1994 Lexus on the front lawn of their northwest Miami-Dade County home. They're poor, and Christopher suffers from Crohn's disease, which forces him to rely on a colostomy bag. Ruth, a retired police records supervisor, lives mostly off Social Security and works part-time at a Marshall's. The two try not to leave the car because Christopher is too uncomfortable without air conditioning.

Their power has been out for a week because of a fire in an electrical panel next to their power meter.

A Florida Power & Light worker who visited Thursday said Ruth needed to hire an electrician and provided a phone number to tell FPL when the box was repaired.

Ruth's bank account is overdrawn and her son can't work because of his condition.

Christopher says he can stay with his father in Weston, but doesn't really want to. He's still feeling insecure because the bag was only installed in June, his mom said.

"I don't want to go anywhere else, but I may have no choice," Christopher said of leaving his mother.

Storm evacuees who poured into the Florida Panhandle are starting to face the grim reality that they no longer have a home to return to. Earl Clark, 45, spent Thursday in Pensacola trying to start a new life in a strange city that was never supposed to become home. Twenty years of waiting tables in the French Quarter should be worth something, he guessed, so he applied to restaurants there as his son, Earl Jr., approached the post office for work.

Clark fled New Orleans reluctantly but never thought he wouldn't be able to go back. However, he now understands the harrowing reality: He is no longer an evacuee, but a refugee -- and there is nothing left of his life there.

"We'll go back to visit, see if there's something to salvage," Clark said. "It hit me yesterday. We're going to have to relocate. Where? We'll see who gets a job first."

Clark was ragged at day's end. A nearby restaurant, Copeland's Famous New Orleans, where he figured he'd have an obvious in, wasn't hiring. "Tomorrow I'll try the Waffle House," he said.

The Deltona City Commission voted Thursday to donate two homes for two years to a couple families left homeless by Hurricane Katrina. The city will rely on nonprofit organizations to choose the families, Mayor John Masiarczyk said.

"We have Americans dying and who don't have a roof over their heads, and we have these two houses sitting there empty," Masiarczyk said. "It was so obvious a way to help."

The city purchased the three-bedroom homes two years ago as part of a drainage project. They were supposed to be demolished, but the first phase of the project worked so well that immediate destruction wasn't necessary.